Attitude Starts at Home
By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project
Survive the Drama – Everyone Hates New Challenges
It is your first week at a new job. You have a lot to learn, you don’t know anyone, you forgot your lunch, and you don’t know where to eat. As an adult, you struggle and stress tremendously when starting this new challenge, but you will likely wait until you get home to complain about getting lost while looking for the break-room and all the scheduled meetings. Sure, you are excited about new opportunities and certainly the gains in income, but starting new challenges is, well, yucky. This scenario is no different when you first start educating at home, only the lunchroom is sometimes easier to find.
When your student starts a new academically challenging class there will be complaints. Everything is new, they want to do well but fear they won’t, and they don’t know all the answers nor understand all the expectations, they aren’t sure yet where to go. Yucky. We get it. For all of us, a good snack, hydration, and supportive words will help you and your student survive this dramatic start.
Praise the Effort, not the Smarts
Your student is putting in the time. All the signs are good because flash cards are in use, assignments are getting read, tasks are being completed. Praise all of this excellent activity because a growth mindset affirms that one can only get good at something after putting in some effort. You are fighting against the far more normal mindset of the undeveloped mind, namely that our talents are somehow already “fixed in place” (as in set in stone, stationary) at birth. Logic prescribes this isn’t so.
Don’t wait until that fabulous grade arrives on the first big exam to say, “well done.” The goal is steady consistent effort. Ever-improving grades are a nice bonus side-effect of putting in determination and struggle.
I like to use one of my son’s college experiences as an example. He’s now a gainfully employed physical therapist but his first class for his first semester of college was much the same as every other student who has grand plans for a medical career: anatomy and physiology. A&P lost half of the students before the drop deadline. Students who had luminous academic scores in high school were clawing towards scores in the low C range, the minimum to pass a course that is needed to move on in medicine. Another half of the remaining students didn’t pass and changed their majors. My son was pleased and proud to earn a low B (and retook it his senior year for an A).
An academically challenging course that was a career-do-or-die offered no chance for glamorous rewards but needed determination and grit. That score didn’t look particularly “smart” on paper, unless you too have been through this type of class. The work that really matters may not always look smart but sticking with it? That’s the prize!
Don’t Foster an Addiction to Do-Overs
A trendy policy in public education right now is the habit of constantly allowing re-dos and retakes and do-overs and mulligans. In all the history of education, this was never normal, primarily because there is zero motivation for a student to study for anything. Enter that quiz and keep whittling away at a quiz score until boredom hits or you’ve toggled through all the multi-choice options and game the system. Consequently, we have millions of students who not only don’t need to study but now certainly can’t study if needed. Why would they?
This approach was introduced when personal devices became a major part of every classroom. Educators could put together a short multi-choice computer graded quiz online and leave it sit. Students can keep retaking the quiz until scores go up, the only goal (learning? Not so much).
The only type of quizzes that work for eternal re-dos are fairly basic by necessity. There isn’t time to grade, regrade, and re-re-grade complex assignments and projects with a room of 40 students. Material is kept at an artificially rudimentary level so it can be completely computer-graded. Now we have students who never learn to write under any type of pressure.
Offers of unlimited retakes give a student no pressure to surpass basic levels but why? If you must prepare a 20-minute well-researched speech to a group of esteemed peers, you prepare fervently. You never know what question the audience might ask! Nobody feels that level of concern over, say, an email in which you casually assemble your points and add important links then answer questions at leisure.
That stressful speech—just like a one-chance-only quiz, exam, or timed essay—pressures you to prepare. You want to present your case knowledgeably. Research, preparation, memorization, and practice naturally help. The reasonable response is subject mastery.
Unlimited re-dos do not mimic real life. Mess up the quarterly report, your boss isn’t going to repeat the meeting. Tangle up holiday plans, you don’t get a second week of vacation to fix everything. Forget your college midterm, you don’t get to reschedule a week later after a second study period. Forget to pay the bills for two months? Good luck.
Your Child Can Do This
Unless the faculty educating your student started teaching yesterday, he or she has had a lot of experience getting students from very limited experience in a particular subject to the point of proving very decent mastery. Constantly model confidence that your student can overcome, persevere, work hard, have determination, and ultimately succeed. Setbacks are expected! Occasional hurdles are required! Failure here and there? Normal! Failure is a teachable moment rather than shame but only if we allow natural heights of success and valleys of failure.
Set Things Up for Success
Provide tools, time, and encouragement. Subtract distractions. Avoid too heavy a load but don’t be afraid to challenge your clever and competent student. A greenhouse plant will quickly perish in the sun and wind unless you acclimate that rose. A common thing that sabotages success at the start of each new semester is the desire to get in “one last” break. Some students can manage the stress of hurrying through the first couple of weeks of classes for a trip. Most can’t. Set things up for success might mean keeping things boring until your student gets on their feet.
Don’t Fill in for Them
Unlike faculty who might have your student for just one semester, our program hosts students often throughout both their middle school and high school years. This means that we can see how they did at the start and compare that work to what they are able to do four, five, or six years later. Unless you are a homeschool parent (and many of you are, so this is a big benefit to home education) there will never be an educator who has the opportunity to see a student start with, say, Latin 1 and finish with Latin 5. All of this is preface to the following absolutely true statement: no student whose parents “fill in for them” ever make it to Latin 5 …or even Latin 2.
It is out of love and concern that we parents are tempted to help by doing a bit of this assignment or that assignment as good examples of how to get the assignment done. It is often very difficult once you help a student in this way to stop because all the prior struggles were lightened and all the necessary coping techniques were never mastered. Never do any of your students’ work.
Make It Ok to Not Be Perfect
Perfectionists struggle more than any other type of student. This form of self-torture will make even the most capable and clever student miserable to the point that they often give up. When questioned, perfectionists will claim their approach is the preferred one! Why shouldn’t one strive to be perfect?!
The problem is that there’s no such thing as perfect here on earth. We are all but shadows of the real thing if ancient Greek philosophy is to be observed and we have all fallen short according to the Bible.
Perfectionists often give birth to other perfectionists. Your task may not just be to help your child navigate towards a healthier relationship with struggle and failure. The fight might start with yourself and how you model perfectionism at home. The next time you mess something up—if you are like me that will be before you go to bed tonight—do your best to model healthy recovery with a little humor and old-fashioned live-and-learn attitude.
